How-To Guide: Business Configuration- Change Projects and It's Life Cycle

Change Projects and its Purpose:

The sole purpose of a change project is to make configuration changes to the solution once the First Implementation project is completed, meaning the system has gone live. These changes can be made by adding/modifying Business Configuration activities.

Change Immediately:

For certain activities that are enabled for Immediate Change, the modification or inclusion can be done on the go, in the production environment itself. Activities enabled for immediate change will be marked Yes under the Immediate Change Possible field in the activity list and can be changed through the button Change Immediately. However, for the rest of the activities, change is possible only through a change project.

When to create a Change Project?

A Change Project will be needed in a case where the user requires to make changes or add activities that are not marked for Immediate Change Possible, in a system that has gone live.

How to create a Change Project?

A change project can be created through the New button in the Implementation Projects view of Business Configuration work center. The prerequisites would be that the First Implementation project is completed[Status: Live or Closed], meaning the production system has gone live. Also note that, the New button will be disabled[greyed out] if the First Implementation project is still ongoing[statuses: In Preparation or Started or Tested].

Types of Change Project:

There can be two possibilities for implementing a change project:

Change Project without a test system.

In this case, the necessary scoping and fine-tuning changes can be made in the production system itself. This is advisable in a situation where there are minor changes being made and there is no need for testing scenarios to check the behaviour of the change.

Change Project with test system.The concept of requesting a test system for individual Change Projects does not exist, any more. The Request System button will take the user to the Systems views of the Service Control Center work center to create a new system.If you do not have a test system already, you can proceed with requesting the same. You could either use the option to Copy the Source System as is, or you could also copy only the solution profile you want into the new system.If you do have a test system already, the solution profile of the change project used can be copied into the test system using the Copy Solution Profile button in the Systems view. In the pop-up you can specify the Source Solution Profile ID by using the value help and searching the description with the name of the change project. You will have to also specify the Target System in this case.

Once the necessary changes and testings are done with, the change project can be merged back to the production system using the 'Merge Changes with Production System' activity.

Please Note: The customer will first be given an initial implementation test system. Once the scoping and test are confirmed, they must request the production tenant based on the solution profile of the test tenant.

The following applies for change projects with/without a test system:

During the implementation of a change project if the user decide to scrap a change project he could he either delete or cancel the change project. A project in status In Preparation can be deleted, but for a project in status Started or beyond, the only option is to cancel the project.To know how to cancel or deleted a change project help documents titled Cancel A Change Project and Delete a Change project can be referred. The following are the different status changes that can be observed for the projects: Initial status of the implementation project is In Preparation.Confirming the milestone Scoping Completed changes the status of the project to Started.Confirming the milestone Test Completed changes the status of the project to Tested.Closing the activity Merge Changes with Production System changes the status of the project to Merged.Closing the activity Activate Solution Capabilities changes the status of the project to Activated.Confirming the milestone Go Live changes the status of the project to Completed.Confirming the milestone Close Project changes the status of the project to Closed.

Repetition Required:

Some activities(to state an example, data migration activities) in the Activity List have to be repeated in other systems because the data in these activities cannot be copied automatically to another system. For example, if you maintain an activity in your test system, you must also repeat this activity in your production system. In the Activity List, you can see which activities have to be repeated in the Repetition Required column.

Data Migration in Change Projects:

All data migration related activities are marked for Repetition Required in the activity list. Irrespective of whether the change project is implemented in a test system or not, all data migration related activities will re-open once the change project is merged and will have to be closed again manually, after the data is migrated again in the productive workspace.

References:

For further information you can refer the help centre documents with the following title through your system: